Sauce

The musical landscape may have shifted dramatically since bassist Jay Bentley, inspired by The Germs and Jack Kerouac, helped form Los Angeles punk protagonists Bad Religion in 1980, yet there remains at his core a sense of teenage malcontent that helped shape the groups’ early days.

“I might be a little bit more specific about my anger now,” says Bentley on the phone. “I think when I was fourteen I was pretty much pissed at the world, which every fourteen-year-old is, you know? You’re pissed at your parents and you hate your school. And when I was fourteen we hated Jerry Falwell and we hated this organised televangelism and we thought politics was a sham because during the Cold War we were told we could die at any minute. These are probably the things fourteen-year-olds shouldn’t be thinking, you know? I don’t want my kid thinking that every time he gets on an aeroplane something’s going to happen.

“But from fourteen to now I understand who I’m mad at and a lot of times I’m mad about the way I react to how that person makes me feel – and that’s a big difference. Particularly in the band when we were young we were writing a lot of things with fingers pointing outwards and now we write with fingers pointed inwards.”

Describing Bad Religion as the best therapy he’s ever had – “I get to go out and scream at the top of my lungs on a nightly basis” – Bentley and band recently delivered their fourteen studio album New Maps of Hell and announced an Australian tour for later this year. Closer to the end of their career than the beginning, the quintet hold no sentimentality towards this or any of their records.

“I don’t know if they become more precious or if you’re just more willing to let go of them,” reasons Bentley. “We just go into the studio and hammer out sixteen or seventeen songs and we listen back to them and we’re all looking at each other saying ‘we like it, then fuck everybody else because it’s what we want to do’. That seems to have worked for us for twenty-five of our twenty-seven years, so why not do that again?”

As with the majority of Bad Religion albums, New Maps of Hell was penned mostly by singer Greg Graffin and guitarist Brett Gurewitz.

“Brett is a romantic prose writer and likes to write in hopeful ways, and Greg is the scientist and writes in ways that are very factual,” says Bentley. “So having the two of them lyrically writing back and forth, that to me is how the records evolve into what they are. Greg is very particular when he makes his demos, he comes in and says ‘this is what I’ve got’ and so our job is to take it and try to evolve it two or three steps further. With Brett, he’ll come in with a kazoo and half the lyrics and say ‘let’s just make this up as we go along’. But between the two of them it’s healthy competition.”

For our interview Bentley is calling from Pennsylvania mid-way through this year’s Warped tour, the annual punk-rock caravan whose humble origins the bassist recants.

“The first incarnation of what became the Warped tour was something called Bored In The South Bay which was around ’94,” says Bentley. “That wasn’t a travelling event but rather just a big event down in Long Beach, California where (organiser) Kevin (Lyman) put together ten or twelve bands with a bunch of skaters and bikers and so it started from that.”

So how has the festival changed since you first joined up a decade ago?

“When we came out here in 1998 I think we were pretty naïve,” says Bentley, “and I think we thought about making some sort of visual impact. But we got beat down by the weather in about three minutes because we landed in Phoenix and the first show was on blacktop. And Phoenix in the summer at 120 degrees on black top at about 140 degrees, you throw up when you’re playing! So that was the first Warped tour for us and it was not what we thought it was going to be at all.

“Music now is fifty-percent visual, which is kind of weird,” he adds. “It’s no longer as much about music as it is entertainment and how you look and what logo’s on your shirt. And that’s a big change from when I was a kid, because it was a very self-exploratory scenario where you just went into a fantasy world while listening to bands play. I remember the first time I ever saw a Clash video I was so astonished – ‘oh, they’re moving!’.”

New Maps of Hell is out on Epitaph through Shock.